In the universe of Iain M. Banks's hyper-advanced people, The Culture, there's everything from dystopian ultra-capitalist planets, small debauched backwaters, "Sublimed" civilisations living in entire other dimensions, neglectful precursors, Proud Warrior Races, post-singularity communist civs...well, you get the idea. The fact that this is just a very incomplete list of some of the civilisation types should tip you off to the fact that this series mixes-and-matches an awful lot of sci-fi tropes. Tech levels vary right alongside the civilisations, although we rarely see a world a great deal less developed than present day Earth. Expect to see Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale stunningly averted, in both range and size of ships, drones, space battles, androids, sentient space-suits, conspiracies and counter-conspiracies.

Doctor Who, by virtue of being an extreme Long Runner with a massive expandeduniverse, ranges through the entirety of time and space. After 50+ years of stories, that's a lot of sci-fi ideas - you've got high-tech military forces battling witches and ancient astral demons, mixed in with genocidal robots and sentient nanoswarms.

Tabletop Games

Warhammer 40,000 - sometimes it's like each army is there to be a representative of a different sort of science fiction. Your Space Marines are your, unsurprisingly, post-HeinleinianSpace Marines infused with knights and religious fervor, the Imperium fields big BattleTech-style mechs, the Imperial Guard are essentially Star Wars' stormtroopers (which are even referenced by name!) with several different flavors, ranging from World War I trench warfare (the Death Korps of Krieg) to Vietnam-style survivalists (Catachans), Tyranids are books are about Bug War, Tau are animesque mecha and firepower and The Federation, Eldar are Clark's Third LawSufficiently Advanced Aliens that lean heavily towards ninja-style weapons (everything they fire are shurikens), rely on psychic powers, and take the traditional Japanese leaning, spaceship battles feel like they come out of the Honor Harrington universe, Necrons are Terminator and so on. If anybody want to write about or parody a certain type of science fiction, then they can.

Traveller is the first RPG to truly mix every science fiction trope into one setting. The subgenre can change depending on where your character is located in the galaxy. If they're constantly traveling through space by ship, it's a Space Opera (which is what the game was originally advertised as). If your character is stranded on a primitive world, far away from civilized space, it's a Planetary Romance. If you're on a high-tech planet where everything is connected to the internet, it becomes Cyberpunk. When you go out into the Spinward territories, you're in a Space Western. Even a Post-Apocalyptic setting is possible if it's set between the Second and Third Imperium eras.

Trinity was launched as one of these as well. You want Cyberpunk? America's corporate-owned and full of technopaths. You want wasteland? Paris and a huge chunk of the surrounding land got nuked. You want Space Opera? Mankind's made first contact and is currently involved in political dealings with at least three different species. You want Psychic Powers? What flavor do you want them in?

Infinity is much the same - Cyberpunk tropes happily contained in PanOceania's warring hypercorps and corporate troops alongside Space Knights, European troopers in armor heavily inspired by Appleseed's E-SWAT, and soldiers that are heavily based on the film version of Starship Troopers (down to the "Would you like to know more?" Catch Phrase), space Samurai, ninja, and sprawling animeesque and East Asian sci-fi in Yu Jing, a Used Future in the Ariadnans (who are mostly military-fiction, unchanged 20th/21st century units wielding rifles that wouldn't be out of place in a modern setting) and the Nomads (who experiment with bioengineering, giving us Space Catgirls and put the punk in cyberpunk with anarchist sci-fi tropes and punk-inspired designs, with futuristic Roller Derby gals as a unit), an America left devastated by a nanoswarm, becoming a Mad Max-esque apocalyptic wasteland, Dune-esque Haqqislam units who literally control the Spice flow, Halo-esque Morats hired by an insane conglomerate of AIs, bio-tech, organic Tohaa - all watched by a Tron Lines-and-Apple-esque faction, ALEPH, who attempt to bring order to the human factions.

The expansions really ramp up the ante: Leviathans gives more Eldritch Abominations, including ghost-like things that come straight out of Pulsars, a giant Space Dragon (and with luck you can even hatch your own, smaller, Space Dragon), and a thing called a Dimensional Horror. You also get NPC Space Stations that variably act as advisors, artists or traders in space.

Utopia adds megastructures, which includes making your own habitats, ring worlds and even Dyson Spheres. If that's not your thing, there is always genetic modification, cybernetics and Brain Uploading, or researching Psychic Powers.

Synthetic Dawn allows you to play as an empire of Machines, either in Geth, Terminator, Borg or Minds flavour. You can even find a fallen machine empire, who may help you, or may turn crazy.

Fallout could be called either an post-apocalypse kitchen sink or a sink that focuses on sci-fi elements popular in The '50s. You've got radiation-warped mutants, immortal zombies that gradually turn feral as their minds break down, robots ranging from Robby of Forbidden Planet to Terminator-esque synths, one or two Little Green Men, drugs that bestow psychic powers, disembodied living brains, and even a few people who bring justice to the wasteland by dressing up as ancient superheroes.

Futurama: Everything that exists in the Sci Fi Writer's Handbook exists here plus a heaping helping of Rule of Funny and It Runs on Nonsensoleum. Word of God says in the DVD Commentary that they realized just how far down this rabbit hole they'd gone when they agonized over whether it was okay to feature a wizard alongside everything else, they did, and nobody in the audience blinked.

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